Skip to main content

The Test of Love

It is February 2012. Joana has brought her son Vinnie to Boots in Ipswich for a routine eye test. The Optometrist on the day is Honey Rose. She looks at Vinnie’s eyes and gives Vinnie a clean bill of health. Fast forward five months to July 2012. Vinnie is admitted to the hospital, and dies shortly aged 8, due to fluid building up on his brain.

It turns out that when Honey examined Vinnie she failed to spot obvious abnormalities in both of his eyes. In fact, had she even checked the photographs taken by another staff showing the back of Vinnie’s eye, she would have spotted that Vinnie suffered from a serious condition in which optic discs at the back of each eye become swollen because of raised pressure within the skull.

As the QC said during the trial, Honey missed something that any competent optometrist" and would have seen! The failure to properly diagnose Vinnie’s condition led to his tragic death. Honey was rightly sentenced for gross negligence manslaughter.

The tragic death of Vinnie is a reminder to all of us of the high price of poorly diagnosing our physical condition. And yet as tragic as Vinnie’s death is, there is even something more tragic – failing to properly diagnosis your spiritual condition. What is the true state of your faith? How do you know you are truly trusting in God in accordance with the Bible?

The apostle John in his first letter gives various tests of what true faith looks. And among those tests is that a true child of God loves the Fater and His family: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome” (1 John 5:2-3).

Two things are always are true when babies are born. First, every baby is born into some family. The family not be functional or loving, but that child is born into a family. Second, the baby has certain physical characteristics of his or her parents. He may have the eyes of his mother or a nose like his father. Newborns have characteristics of their parents that becomes more recognisable as time passes.

The christian life is like that. When are born again, we are not orphans, God is now our Father and we have siblings. Because God is love, all children of God bear his resemblance of love. We love God and we love His children. This is a redline for God. You are not a true child of God if you do not love God and His children. In fact loving God and his family are the essence of the commandments given by the Lord Jesus.

Now some people may say, that is just impossible. The bar of love is too high! But John says it is not a burden at all because we have been born of God. Jesus did not come to die on a bloody cross to make us nicer people. Jesus has come to radically and eternally transform us. Jesus does this by giving us a new spiritual DNA that now relates to God as our Father and to other believers as genuine children of God.

Every country has laws that places responsibilities on parents to take care and protect their children (not to neglect them). Is it a burden for parents to obey such laws to care for their children? Do parents obey the laws out of fear of prison? No! They obey the law out of love!

This is the same with all true children of God. It is not a burden to obey God to love Him and His children because we are truly His children! Not just children, but children who have the very love of God in us. Where there is true love it lightens the burden of obedience. Jacob had to work for 7 years to win the woman he loved, but Bible says they seemed just a like a few days because of the love he had for her.

Some people treat the church of God as a burden to them. They see God and His people as a burden they must overcome to get to the Heavenly City. But such people are not true followers of Jesus. Because true love from God produces joyful obedience.

Such people are lost and do not realise that our life with God is a loving family relationship. We live for God out of love for our Father. And God gives us his commands in the first place because he loves us. All who are true children of God have genuine evidence of love for God and His people in your life. If you do, then you are truly born of God! The third mark of true faith is persevering faith..

Love Series:
Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2017

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Shame of Worldly Joy

Only a Christian can be joyful and wise at the same time, because all other people either rejoice about things that they should be ashamed of (Philippians 3:19) or things that will disappear. A Christian is not ashamed of his joy, because he is not joyful about something shameful. That is why the Apostle Paul in [2 Corinthians 1:12] defends his joy. He says, I don’t care if everyone knows what makes me happy, because it is the ‘testimony of my conscience.’ He means, let other people can be happy about base pleasures that they are afraid to admit; let other people rejoice in riches, fame, or popularity; they can be happy about whatever they want, but my joy is different. ‘I rejoice because of my conscience.’ A Christian has a happiness that he can stand by and prove. No one else can do that. They will feel embarrassed and guilty if their happiness is found in something that is outside of themselves. They cannot say, ‘this is what makes me happy’. But a Christian has the approval of his ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Incarnation and Modernity

[The Bible] resituate modernity's prejudices within a wider context from which they were originally wrenched, showing them to be reductive heresies of a more complex biblical reality. So whereas modernity privileges an unchanging a-historicity, in the incarnation God enters history at a particular moment to gather a people to be with him not in a Greck eternity of unchanging timelessness, but in a biblical eternity of never-ending and ever-renewed intimacy and relational richness. Whereas modernity subordinates the particular to the universal, the Bible perfectly marries the universal "image of the invisible God" together with a particular first-century Palestinian Jewish man. Whereas modernity seeks the abstract over the material and finds itself painfully akimbo between the twin idols of materialism and immaterialism, in the same gesture the incarnate Christ validates material reality and prevents his followers from ever worshipping it. Finally, whereas modernity secks ...
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →

Pride vs Humility

Spiritual pride tends to speak of other persons’ sins with bitterness or with laughter and an air of contempt. But pure Christian humility rather tends either to be silent about these problems or to speak of them with grief and pity. Spiritual pride is very apt to suspect others, but a humble Christian is most guarded about himself. He is as suspicious of nothing in the world as he is of his own heart. The proud person is apt to find fault with other believers, that they are low in grace, and to be quick to note their deficiencies. But the humble Christian has so much to do at home and sees so much evil in his own heart and is so concerned about it that he is not apt to be very busy with other hearts. He is apt to esteem others better than himself. JONATHAN EDWARDS  (Source: The Works of Jonathan Edward’s, Volume 1)
Post a Comment
KEEP READING →